Animation & Jewelry Collaboration

For this project we were given a brief that required us to think about the world in a hundred years from now and come up with an idea that could possibly aid humanity in some way.

In the first week of the project we all got together in the jewelry department and had a go at sand casting. It was actually pretty fun and it was really cool to see how the process is done. our group choose to cast a peanut, which turned out surprisingly well, the puerta really taking to the mold we made. Once the mold was out we didn't bother cutting off the button or the waste that surrounded the outside of the metal peanut as it looked like some sort of halo around it. We kinda liked the idea that it looked like some sort of deity standing on top of a mountain. We also gold leafed the sucker to add to the effect. Overall it was really fun!

What we also did in the second week was get together and create phonotropes which was pretty fun two and was a good way to get us eased into the project. Another thing we had to do during the first two weeks was come up with our own personal solutions and ideas to the project brief. One of my ideas was to do something along the lines of tackling humanity's growing problem of world hunger and how this would be a big problem in the future. I began to simply sketch a few concepts of the idea, initially coming up with the idea of large gardens in space that would be able to grow a variety of crops and would be self automated with robots cultivating the crops and sending them back to the various countries of earth.

One of my other ideas was along the line of exo-suits helping the disabled to walk again. Having literal structures on there body that would do this. There is actual evidence of this happening today, and I thought this maybe a possible route to go down but in the end once our groups formed these ideas ended up not being used. 

To begin with once we got together as a group, we began to brainstorm ideas that we wanted to run with for the project. We all wanted to choose the theme of robots and robots replacing jobs and we wanted to convey this in a way that would combine all of our strengths and allow us to work together and try a bit of each others subject areas. We decided that we wanted our group to act as a robotics manufacturing company, called Actuator Laboratories which would set out with the intention to aid humanity in doing any, dangerous, dirty or mundane jobs that humans have to do and freeing them up for more creative and scientific jobs. Once we had this figured out after a long first meeting we decided to use the weekend to firstly go about designing the robots, conceptualizing them ourselves and seeing what we each came up with. Ultimately choosing one we thought would fit with the theme that we wanted to go with.

Pinterest Research: 

Pintrest: https://uk.pinterest.com/tyler1599/robots/

Over the weekend I began to look at a range of robots trying to focus on ones which had very clean designs and very friendly appearances. Since these were the kinds of robots that you would want to see out and about in your town or city. As I was doing this I also began to do a lot of my own robot sketches, trying to come up with designs with the same principle.

                     

Once we met back up again we began to talk about things like what would the badges look like, what were we going to do for posters and what were we going to do for our group film. We began by discussing what the badges would look like sketching out loads of different ideas. Nikki over the weekend decided to do some concept badges on Rhino an 3D software, (much like Maya but without the aded element of animation) to show us. 

We took these and applied them to the sketches we made while talking and coming up with ways we could make these badges. At some point we came to the conclusion that we wanted them to have an interchangeable element incorporated within them however we needed a solid design first. I suggested the idea of having the badges just simply be an AL for actuator laboratories. everyone seemed to like this and we decided upon taking a couple of ideas further (the ideas seen below). Ones which Niki again took away and created 3D- models of. 

Nicolas Final Rhino designs

The one we ended up choosing:

James and Ivan were interested in doing the posters for the project and we came up with the idea that they could create ones which are basically adds for a new type of robot. This got us talking about a possible advert/ commercial type film, in which we could promote and sell our latest and greatest robot to come out of our company. I look at Portal 2's "Aperture Investment Opportunities" adverts as these are very funny and really great little mock adverts that I thought we could take a page from. I also was looking at actual 1950's commercials as this was something I thought would be a cool thing to try and replicate, just with futuristic looking robots instead. 

               

Spencer thought it would be a cool idea to actually create a stopmotion  robot for the film and suggested that it could be the new and latest robot we would be selling. We all thought this would be a cool idea and what was also good about this was it would allow Spencer to incorporate his skills in stopmotion and model making and apply them to the film too.  At this point we all began to go ahead and begin to do our own separate thing within the group. James began work on the poster designs. Spencer and Ivan started work on building machetes/armatures. Nicky made a start on getting the CAD badge model finalized and organised for the 3D printing of the master jewelry piece, as well as getting the inserts for badge laser cut. And I began the planning for the commercial and animating my sequences for it. 

Further robot Concepts:

Like the subheading says these were the final robot concepts that I designed in Photoshop, I knew I wanted all of the robots to look similar, helping to keep an integrated theme. Like they all recognizably came from the same company. I actually quite enjoyed creating these and I ended up actually using them for the final commercial, separating the drawing up and then animating them in after effects.

During this time I also made a quick character sheet for the home bot that Spencer and Ivan would be making just to give them a idea of what the robot looks like from all angles. 

This sheet I quickly drew up for Spencer to give him the different perspectives for the model. 

Animatic for the commercial:

I also quickly created an animatic just to show the group what the commercial will look like and kind of give us something to work towards. Everybody seemed to like this format, so me an Niki went off and created a script for the commercials voice over.  

Animatic for robot Test 001 from Tyler Carrigan on Vimeo.

Script Reading and Voice Over Recording/ Editing:

Once the script was created myself and James decided to hire out an Ederol sound recorder and we began to record ourselves reading out the script in an american accent (we are still unsure as to why). And so after a long time spent recording and numerous script reads we both each had our own shot at reading out the whole script. Allowing us to choose which ever one sounded best. Anyway once we had the voice overs, I went through each and listened to them over in Audition and normalized them and cleaned them up. I figured I just try and pitch shift our voices to see if we got a more professional sounding voice over. To  my surprise, James reading of the script sounded really cool when his pitch was lowered and we I decided to go with that one. I then just continued to pitch shit and clean up all of his audio and had that ready to add to the commercial when it came time.

My section of the animation:

The the animation of my sequence, all of my robots were drawn in Photoshop first, separated up into there individual parts and then subsequently animated in adobe after effects. This surprisingly didn't take long and was one of the easier parts to do when creating the commercial. 

I also tried experimenting with the tech spec visuals that we wanted to composite on top of Spencers stopmotion spinning robot. Essentially what I had in mind was making it look a bit like the visuals tech specs Tony stark can see within the iron man helmet. However with Spencer not being able to animate this part and the lack of time we had to edit everything together I didn't bother using this.

Spencer's Robot Armature

Editing:

I actually ended up having to draw on top of the stop motion footage Spencer gave me, as I needed to add the robots face on. This was something we choose not to do originally because we knew we wanted its face to appear as if it was a screen so I said I would do it in post and it ended up being pretty simple since all the shots we ended up using were still ones. 

I myself edited the whole commercial together, adding James'es sound recordings and layering them on top. Adding Spencer and Ivan's animation to the mix and incorporating my hand drawn animation in as well. This was all edited together in Adobe Premier and took a little while to do however it was not too difficult. 

Final Commercial:

Jewelry & Animation Collaboration: Actuator Laboratories from ECA Animation on Vimeo.


Overall I was happy with how the final commercial turned out and I think It conveyed what we wanted it to in the end. Ideally we planned to have it be longer but there wasn't enough time before the formative and so we didn't manage to do this. However I think that also I would have liked there to be better music but again because of a lack of time, we couldn't find a composer to make an original soundtrack.

My evaluation and thoughts on the project:

 I personally saw myself taking on the role as leader at some points throughout the course of the project, which was unusual because I don’t usually act in this position within a group. The overall amount of things I did within the project was another thing that was surprising and I was pleased with how much I got to try and do. I think I worked well, and our group worked well overall. Everyone was engaged with the project and had good ideas, and for a big group this was surprising. However I did feel like I had done more than my fair share in the making of the commercial however I was prepared to do so and I had fun doing so. I really enjoyed the project and I really enjoyed working with the jewellers and I would definitely do it again.